Channing Tatum

The G.I. Joe star is ready for action

Jul 16, 2009

Thomas Whiteside

Right now, Channing Tatum, the hunky star of this month's action epic G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, is starring in his own personal version of The Biggest Loser. For a week, he's been adhering to a strict low-carb meal plan and working out three times a day with an ex–Navy Seal. Today, he's even brought his own lunch, if you can call it that, to a West Hollywood café: one American cheese slice, one small apple, one even smaller bunch of grapes, and, for dessert, four peanuts in a tiny condiment container. To play Duke, the Special Ops hero who battles his nemesis, Cobra, in Joe, the 29-year-old Tatum had to keep his six-pack at attention for an ­entire half-year shoot.

It's hard to tell from his V-neck T-shirt and extra-baggy distressed jeans, but Tatum insists he's packed on 20 pounds. "I love my life entirely too much to worry about it," he says, green eyes twinkling. But when paparazzi caught him running shirtless the other day, it did not go unnoticed. "They said, `He let himself go!' " he explains, incredulous. "I'm like, `I'm a guy! It should never matter that much!' " He tosses back the peanuts like a shot of tequila.

Such is the price he must pay for giving us the opportunity to appreciate his buffed body in pretty much every film he's made, from the teenage Twelfth Night romance, She's the Man with Amanda Bynes, to Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, to last spring's Fighting, in which his rogue street fighter, Shawn MacArthur, suits up for every pummeling in an extra-tight white tank. Google "Channing Tatum" and you'll find plenty of shots from his pre-film modeling career. In campaigns for Dolce & Gabbana, Nautica, and Abercrombie, he perfected his signature look—a shaved head, pillowy pursed lips, and tight, tanned abs showcased in positions that range from silly to impossibly sexy. In one memorable shot, snapped by Bruce Weber, the laces of Tatum's leather pants are suggestively undone, and he's lovingly cradling a rooster to his bulging pecs. "My friends give me shit about that one," he says with a laugh. "They're like, `Really? A cock?' But I don't regret anything. There's a naked picture of me out there somewhere," he says with a shrug. "I just want to get it out there that it was really cold in the room."

G.I. Joe was for Tatum, who grew up staging elaborate battles with the action figures, a "wily" kid's dream. Even though he and Marlon Wayons were nearly asphyxiated by their constricting black suits and airless helmets, "We just laughed our way through it," Tatum says. This was achieved in part by pranking costars Sienna Miller and Rachel Nichols—"a lot of burping, farting," Nichols says. "He filled someone's car with porn." The first time the cast got together for a table read, "Marlon showed me his butt, and, I think, Sienna slapped it," Tatum says. His goofiness seems inversely proportional to his good looks and his success. "He is one of the nicest guys—a guys' guy and a girls' guy," says Joe director Stephen ­Sommers. Equally surprising is Tatum's acute awareness of his place in the Hollywood world order. He is the first to admit that his body, and what he can do with it, was the basis for his career and to a certain extent, still is.

The muscles are a product of his compulsive nature. "Anything I love, I become utterly obsessed with," he says. The Tatum family is based on a farm in Alabama, but his parents, Kay and Glenn (she worked for an airline, he in construction), moved Tatum and older sister Paige to Tampa, Florida, where Tatum discovered Gor Chor kung fu, an especially brutal martial art. In high school, when he got sick of being the tall, white football player on the sidelines, he taught himself to break-dance. Within days, he was doing head spins. He did his first back flip off a chain-link fence on a dare.

He got a football scholarship to Glenville State College in West Virginia but dropped out and found himself ­doing everything from framing houses to working as a mortgage broker. He moved to Miami and was discovered on the street by a model scout, leading him to videos and commercials. By 2001, he was living in New York, taking acting lessons, and three years later he moved to Hollywood. With little more than a few episodes of CSI: Miami on his résumé, he landed the lead in Disney's Step Up, the 2006 dance-based teen romance that earned $114 million. Tatum plays Tyler Gage, a Baltimore punk sentenced to community service at a performing arts school. Soon he's popping and locking alongside an aspiring ballerina played by Jenna Dewan; they've been together ever since. Last fall, he proposed in Maui. Rumor is they'll get hitched this summer.

Around the same time that Tatum landed Step Up, he read the script for A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Dito Monteil's gritty semi-autobiopic about growing up in Queens in the 1980s, co-starring Robert Downey Jr. Tatum found himself crying uncontrollably. He told his agent he needed to play Antonio, the hotheaded punk who bleeds loneliness. "I couldn't have fought harder to keep him out of my movie," says Monteil, who also wrote and directed Fighting. "I said, `This guy's a male model from freakin' Abercrombie.'" But Tatum pursued the part relentlessly. "I'm so glad I lost that argument," Monteil adds.

"You can tell how strong an actor he is by how he'll underplay something," says Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays opposite ­Tatum in Joe, worked with him on ­Havoc and on Stop-Loss, and will be one of his ­dozen-plus groomsmen. ("If I have a bromance with you," Tatum says, "that's it.")

When Saints debuted at Sundance in 2006, Tatum's portrayal of Antonio lit up the phones. With his hair dyed black and his boyish shoulders hunched under a sleeveless jean jacket, his freewheeling rage is so menacing that it's hard to watch. The honesty came from experience. "Antonio was my friend growing up," Tatum says. "I was more the Dito. I was the one who walked away from people."

The performance got him nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, and soon, "every time they needed a white guy to say `yo' or `dawg,' they called me," he says with a laugh. He had no interest in coasting on that thug-with-a-heart persona. "I wasn't the best actor, and I'm probably still not. But I work harder than anyone I know."

He spends every free second he has studying performances and scripts and figuring out how he can "get in the room" with directors he admires. His favorite performance to date is his least physical. In Dear John, out this winter and directed by Lasse Hallström and written by The Notebook's Nicholas Sparks, Tatum plays a soldier home on leave who falls for a college student played by Amanda Seyfried.

"I'm just starting to wrap my head around how to become a real character," he says. "I used to think you always had to be doing something, literally moving, to stay interesting. I'm working on stillness."

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